Chapter 7

JESSICA – My new life

Finally, I finished the long drive across the state and was ready to go to work. The company, West Slope Oil, was a full-scale trial between several oil companies and the federal government ... sort of a pilot project. I was amazed at the respect I was shown; it turned out the environmental aspects were given the highest priorities and everyone really stepped forward to help me out.

They put me up in a hotel for two weeks while I looked for a place to stay. The offer was that they would pay half of my housing for the first year, knowing that even though I was going to be making some good money, I still had some student loans to pay off. I looked at apartments and condominiums, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the crowded parking lots and the buildings so close together.

After searching for two weeks, I was having breakfast at a great little mom and pop kind of place, ham steaks, three eggs, a mountain of hash browns, homemade biscuits, you get the idea. I got to chatting with the waitress and she mentioned her parents were trying to sell their small ranch just before De Beque, about thirty-five miles back up I-70 towards Denver. She said they were having problems finding anyone interested and that they would consider a lease to buy.

I went out to look at the property and to talk with her parents. I fell in love with the place immediately. It was about eighty acres strung out along a creek that entered into the Colorado River from the north. The road was a dead-end that died at the ranch house. There were a couple of barns, three corrals, and a nicely maintained, but small log cabin. It was about fifty years old but was really clean. There was one big room that was the living room, dining room and kitchen. At the back of the house was a bathroom in the middle with a bedroom on each side, each of which had a door into the bathroom.

The couple was retiring and had bought a small house in Grand Junction. They had raised horses for most of their lives and still had a half dozen left along with ten miniature horses they had been breeding and selling as pets. They almost begged me to take the place and to take care of the horses. They said if I would take care of the animals, they would split with me 50-50 any money made. One barn was full of hay and they had several kids from the local 4-H that would come out and help with the animals.

It was heaven for me! The company gave me a four-wheel drive truck, since I would be spending a lot of time in the backcountry. I moved in a couple of weeks later and felt a wonderful satisfaction as I sat on the front porch of an evening with a mug of tea and looked out at my little slice of heaven. I was happy for the first time in my life ... but still lonely. I did call Cal and told him about the place I’d found. He thought he knew the place but he wasn’t sure. It was nice to talk to him and it helped the loneliness some.

The job was working out great! The company was using a new process of extracting oil from the shale, “in-situ.” Instead of a physical extraction and processing of the shale, the shale was heated underground and the oil then extracted. To make the extraction process effective, the shale around the area to be worked had to be frozen. If we could show the combined heating/freezing technologies worked, we could put oil on the market for $30 a barrel!

My job was to make sure that in freezing the surrounding ground water that no pollution occurred. It was a strong technical challenge and expertise had to be developed on the fly. I was pleased that I was accepted as an equal member of the team and everyone accepted my credentials and my expertise.

I had been raised in the social climate of the West Slope of Colorado and I knew what the men were like. I had learned the hard way to let them know that I wouldn’t take any crap from them. Of course, men made advances but every time I was tempted, I remembered Cal and what he had done for me. I hadn’t seen him since I moved to Grand Junction several months ago. He had asked me to call his parents and meet them but I kept putting it off.

Finally, I ran out of excuses and called them and they invited me to their ranch in Rifle for a Sunday dinner. I drove to their ranch, about thirty miles to Rifle from De Beque and then a dozen or so miles north on Government Road. They had about three hundred acres in the valley and a couple thousand more in the hills to the east of the valley. It was a huge operation, and the house was an amazing, really old, three-story brick house.